Through the Eyes of the Cape Fear--Voices

Interview of Ray Wyche
Transcript Number 074

July 30, 2001

We're in the Columbus County Library in Whiteville, North Carolina, and my name is Ray Wyche, and I'm going to tell of my limited experiences in World War II.

WYCHE: I went into the Army of the United States exactly 56 years ago to this day, July 30, 1945. I went in within two months of my 18th birthday, in 1945. The Selective Service System, the Draft, took any reasonably healthy 18 year-old male very shortly after his 18th birthday. I wanted to go into the service at the age of 17. I went to Hallsboro High School, which had only 11 years, so I got out of high school at age 17, but my parents refused to let me go. They had three other sons in combat zones at that time, and they said, "No, you're not going."

I attended Wake Forest College for one year and prior to being drafted in July of 1945, I harvested tobacco, which is back-breaking, hard work, but which stood me in good stead when I got into infantry basic training. I took infantry basic at Camp Croft, near Spartanburg, South Carolina. I was trained as a heavy weapons crewman, heavy weapons being considered an 81 millimeter mortar, and a Waterpool 30 caliber machine gun. The training was hard, but I managed to get through it.

After completion of training, I went to Camp Pickettt, Virginia, for a week, and Camp Shanks, New York, for a week. At Camp Pickettt, we knew we were all going overseas as infantry replacements even though the war was over at that time. The Army was still geared up to a combat situation. And I remember that they gathered us, we heard rumor after rumor, "We're going to the Pacific, we're going to Europe, we're going to be sent home." They called us into a theater in Camp Pickettt between Christmas and New Year's. I remember distinctly that they finally got the theater full of replacement infantrymen quiet, and then said, "We've got a movie to show you," and the movie began, "This is Germany." The place went wild. All of us wanted to go to Germany rather than the Far East.

So after a week at Camp Shanks, I shipped from New York and landed in Le Havre, France. I think the date was January 9, 1946. And the morning before the ship docked in Le Havre, I had been seasick for nine days, or eight days, the entire crossing. I woke up with a terrific pain in my lower abdomen. The ship's doctor said, "You've got appendicitis, but it's bad to operate aboard ship, and there's a good general hospital in Le Havre. We'll have you ashore in three hours, and I will give you a shot to make you feel better." And it did, the best I had felt in nine days.

I was taken off the troop ship by cargo boom on a stretcher, put on an army tug, and transferred to an army ambulance on the wharf. And I went to the general hospital in Le Havre and stayed there a week. Each day they did a blood count. Then, that was the best diagnosis for appendicitis. Finally, the doctor, at the end of seven days or so, said, "You didn't have appendicitis, you just had a bad bellyache." And I was sent to Germany.

What I really had was kidney colic, a stone in the urinary tract or in the kidneys. But kidney colic as we call it, is a localized disease or malady which is not prevalent or does not occur in a lot of areas of the United States. They say it's not caused from water, it's caused from some chemicals in the soil, or the lack of some chemicals. So it was after I told doctors after my return here about it, they said, "Well, I'm not surprised. If you'd had a North Carolina doctor, he'd have gotten it right off the bat, but that doctor probably had never heard of kidney colic."

At any rate, I was fortunate. The rest of the bunch was shipped from Le Havre to Germany to a replacement depot, or a repo-depot, as we called them, in boxcars. It was about a 36-hour trip. I was shipped on a passenger train with a compartment to myself with six foot benches on which I could stretch out and sleep. And as a single replacement I was sort of shoved aside.

I went to the replacement depot and it was in Marburg, Germany. I remember going up to get the orders after about three days, and the administrative Sergeant said, "Well, you're only one replacement and it says here on your pre-military record that all you've done was go to school, farm work, and drive a truck." And I did drive, in the early 1940's, a lumber truck hauling fertilizers for my father's business, Pierce and Company.

I was 16 and a half years old and was taking this ton and a half truck to Wilmington, loading it with fertilizer, and bringing it back because he couldn't hire any other truck drivers. So he said, "I'm sending you to the 3rd Division Quartermaster Company as a truck driver." And I got to the 3rd Division Quartermaster Company, they gave me a test on a 6 x 6 truck, a "six by" as we called it, or a deuce 'n ay" after a two and a half ton.

This was equipped with a gasoline tank and the country around there was rather hilly. And, of course, in basic training I had learned to drive a jeep in about 30 minutes, and a weapons carrier. That was my experience in the army driving training, and the lieutenant that took me out said, "I want to see how you handle a "six by," and evidently I didn't handle it too good because he was very non-committal when we got back. He finally came up and said, "You know, the company commander needs a jeep driver." In those days it was not proper for an officer, a commissioned officer to drive himself. Even a Second Lieutenant had to have a driver.

So I was assigned to the company commander as his personal jeep driver, which was very, very good duty. I was stationed at a little town called Ziegenheim in Germany, which is between Kassel and Frankfurt.

At that stage, in the spring of 1946, the Army had not reverted to its old spit and polish discipline, uniform discipline way of life. They were more or less geared up for combat. It's true we saluted an officer when we saw one, but we never stood a formation. If there was a message for us, usually it would be in the mess hall and somebody would scream out or holler. If a high enough officer came around, we may have stood at attention, but I don't think we did. And, as far as uniform goes, you wore whatever you had.

I remember that one of my duties as driver for the company commander was to take him to the 3rd Division Headquarters about 30 miles away, about once a week for a meeting for all unit commanders. I remember distinctly riding up there one spring day wearing a pair of army fatigue pants and a pair of combat boots and an army winter undershirt on, which was sort of like a sweatshirts of the day. I think I probably did have a cap on, but I dressed comfortably.

He came out of his meeting and I could tell something was wrong. While he was in the meeting, I stretched out on the hood of the jeep and leaned back against the windshield and took a nap. I was in full view of the windows of this tremendous hotel that the headquarters was in. And he came out, and, as I say, I could see that something was going to be a little different. He said, "From now on when we come up here, unless you've got a Class A uniform on, I suggest you park the jeep the other way so that the other officers can't see you and what you're wearing." He said, "Some of them told me I was not keeping a very strict military discipline down there if that was my driver."

So I stayed there six months and it was a very good experience. My company commander, and I've seen him since then, he was a First Lieutenant. His name was Vincent Williams, a native of Connecticut, was formerly in the 100th Infantry Division, which ended up after the war in the southern part of Germany. We were considered in the northern part. Actually, Germany was divided into four zones: American, British, French, and Russian, and, of course, we were in the American Zone.

It was about a three hour drive by Autobahn, which you know for me, it was a four lane road of which I had never seen the likes before in North Carolina. I thought it was the most wonderful road in the world, even with the many bombed bridges in it that the Germans blew to slow down the American retreat. Usually they presented no problem because if they went over a small stream, a temporary pontoon bridge was constructed next to it, and if the water wasn't over a foot deep you just drove through the water. Everybody was driving four-wheel drive vehicles.

I got to go to southern Germany to Stuttgart several times. One of my duties was to carry people to the hospital in Kassel which was about 40 miles away. Kassel, incidentally, was one of the most bombed-out cities in Germany, and I remember going up there in the wintertime and paying no attention. The streets were they were bulldozed of rubble, but that was about it. Very few people were living in the town itself and they were living in basements.

I went up there one day and I noticed an odor. I asked the guy with me who had been there what that smell was, that I had noticed it the last time I was up here. He said, "That's bodies in the rubble." I said, "You mean they haven't dug them out?" He said that it was just like the bombs left it. They had bulldozed the street open and that was it. He said, "In the real hot summertime, it gets to you, but that is decomposing humans." That sort of opened my eyes. I could see what the war had done in the way of the damage of buildings.

So, it was real good duty. I kept busy. We were living in German-requisitioned houses. I kept a jeep at the house. We were connected by field telephone to the orderly room in case something was needed, for say an early morning trip. Lieutenant Williams, the company commander, had told me to be by my phone either at the house or come down to the orderly room and sit around, or go to the motor pool, just so he could reach me by phone. I was real careful to do that. And we would drive to chow in my jeep, seven or eight of us hanging on.

We had a fireman - the company fireman had a fire truck there and some would ride on the back of the fire truck. We figured, "Why should I walk a quarter of a mile to town when I've got a vehicle out here?" It was real, real good duty. As I say, the Army had not got back into its mode of strict discipline on anything until June of 1946. The word came that the 3rd Infantry Division, of which of course the 3rd Quartermaster Company was part of, was going home. The company commander told me that the whole outfit was going home except one man. Guess who that one man was. I had been the only replacement they had since the end of the war - a year. I said I didn't think I had to think much about it. He said, "That's right. I'm sorry you're not going with us, but everybody in this outfit is going to be discharged except for the very few who want to be regular Army."

As I say, it was good duty. We lived in requisitioned German homes. Germans were very meticulous record-keepers, so as soon as the Americans conquered a town, the residents of Ziegenheim had never seen any combat other than the bombing of a couple of aircraft factories which didn't do a whole lot of damage, one of which we used for our motor pool. There was no damage.

So the first thing the Army did when it would move into a town like this was to go to the burgermeister, the mayor's office, get the records, see who the Nazi Party bigwigs were. And then say, "We want this house and this house and this house." They would send a contingent of troops to these houses and say, "You've got 30 minutes to get your clothing and anything you want out of this house but the furniture. We're taking it over."

So that's where we lived, and the Army at that time was a little bit undecided about how we were going to treat the Germans. Fraternization had been done away with. It was alright to be seen with a German in a social context. It was forbidden to marry a German, though some of them did it secretly. And the Army said, "Well, we need to put these people to work. Their economy is gone and we're having to feed them. Let's work them and let them start getting something built back, some infrastructure for the cities and towns and all."

So they said that each house we had Americans in, they were going to send a woman in as a housekeeper. And so, soldiers being soldiers they wanted the women to be over 60 years old. And so we had a German woman who would come in every morning about 7:00 o'clock and supposedly straighten up our house. Well, if you didn't have a trip to go that day, and the majority of the company were truck drivers, you stayed in bed long as you wanted to. I was sleeping in a double feather bed. And the German woman would come in and we had her sort of trained. She would tap on my door about 8:00 o'clock in the morning and say, "What would you like for breakfast?" Because being a quartermaster company we managed to, what we called midnight requisition, get any kind of food we wanted. Nobody said anything, and if I said, "Well, I'll have some fried Spam and two scrambled eggs," in a few minutes she'd tap on the door and say, "Your breakfast is on the table." That was good Army service to say the least. Unfortunately, it didn't last.

I was sent down to, I think it was Bamburg, Germany, at this time. Still as a single replacement, and they sent me to the G-3 Headquarters. This may have been the G-3 Headquarters, G-3 being the Army operations designation, of the U. S. Constabulary. And the major in there said, "I need a clerk typist." I said that I had one summer school of typing and I've done very little since. I wasn't a very good typist. I was too clumsy. He said, "Well, here."

He handed me a Stars and Stripes and said, "Copy that column." And I did the best I could because I figured if I didn't do this good, I was liable to find myself pulling guard duty with an infantry company, and I didn't particularly want to do that. And he, again, was very non-committal and I thought, well I was hanging on by the skin of my teeth.

Well, about that time he came into the office and I was sitting there pretending to type. He said, "I'm going to transfer you out because we are organizing as a Constabulary - a new section called Control Section. It's brand new, and each G-2, which was Intelligence, G-3 Operations, Provost Marshall which is police, are to form this new company to send troops to form this new section, Control Section."

The U. S. Constabulary was a strange outfit in a sense. It was organized on the basis of the old cavalry, horse cavalry regiment, or organization. We didn't have regiments, we had squadrons. We didn't have companies, we had troops, and we didn't have battalions, we had brigades. And the way it was organized was strictly as an old-time cavalry.

We never saw a horse, but they said the cavalry was noted for fast hitting and ride the range coverage and this was what constabulary was. It was really the occupation for these forces in Germany after the war. And the army had the bright idea immediately after the war and it just carried on over as long as the constabulary, as long as I was there.

Instead of putting a whole infantry in one town, for example, they sped it up. We want our presence seen and felt as much as possible. Take a very small town and the town of Ziegenheim probably didn't have 3000, 4000 people, and put a company there. Go to the next little town, put a company there, infantry or ordnance, it didn't matter. We weren't doing anything, and back in Ziegenheim, what we were doing at that time, and this was prior to the formation of the Constabulary, were to have shows of force. I never went on one, thank goodness, but I helped organize a couple, or helped arrange some of them. They would take troops, put them in Class-A battle uniform with a full backpack, an M-1 rifle, with a fixed bayonet and a steel helmet and load them in the back of a 6-by truck. And, my job was to tell this driver where to go, draw him a rough map. Go to this village, drive around all you can. Then go to this village and drive around all you can.

The troops were sitting in the back of these trucks and, of course, they were hollering and cussing and smoking. They weren't very military-like. The purpose of this was to remind the Germans - We won the war. We're here and we're on. In case you get any ideas of starting World War III or revolting, we want to show you that we're here in force. And along with these, there would be three or four 6-by's in each convoy. There would be the old M-3, I think it was a six-wheeled, armored car. We did not have any tanks. Some of us laughed at it because the observers had had enough war. We didn't think there was going to be a revolt. I got into the Constabulary and that's what did a lot. They were really a roving police force.

We had probably more jeeps for a hundred men than any unit has ever had before or since in the Army. They would put three men in a jeep, and they wore very distinctive uniforms. We wore battle jackets. Incidentally, by this time the old days of wearing an undershirt out was gone. You were in the Army now. My last year in Germany I wore a necktie every day. But, instead of wearing neckties, we were required to wear the cut-off blouses, the Eisenhower jackets, we called them, battle jackets, which were very comfortable and you wore a bright yellow scarf. It was a snazzy outfit.

We were issued helmet liners with a wide red and yellow stripe, I believe, and a big patch over the front of it - similar to a patch - it was painted on. This was a round circle, yellow, indicating cavalry, a "C" for Constabulary, and had a lightening bolt through it. These people would ride around, and again to remind the Germans that if there was any problem, that is, if GI's were harassing Germans, which was a very frequent occurrence. Or if Germans were fighting among themselves, any place a police presence was needed, the Constabulary could be there. They were always equipped with the very best two-way radios.

But, again, I was in headquarters, and headquarters troop was Constabulary, so when the Major in G-3 said we've got to give up some men, I knew which man he was going to give up - the least useful to him, which was me, which suited me. And I went across the compound.

We were housed in a German army camp, a former German army camp. We had offices in our barracks there, and it was very comfortable. And we reported to G-3 Headquarters. I beg your pardon, the Constabulary Headquarters. And they said, "Oh, you're the new Control Section people. Go down this hall, take a right, go five doors, and you'll see a sign that says 'Control Section.' Ask for Colonel O'Leary." He was our grade officer. And I did, and I walked in and tapped on the door, and a Lieutenant Colonel opened the door.

He had a handful of papers, and said, "How do you say your last name?" And I told him, and he said, "Well, I'm Colonel O'Leary," and he said, "you and I are the Control Section." And I said, "Well, sir, I'm afraid to tell you, but I don't know what you're talking about." To my knowledge I was the first enlisted man in Control Section. And from that day on, for several days, they kept dribbling in. And I'm not bragging, but they were a step above your average infantrymen, because, when I was drafted, and these fellows were drafted, it didn't matter how smart you were.

If you were semi-literate you were going in the Army. Now what you did on, what we used to call the AGCT, Army General Classification Test, which is essentially an IQ test, determined the kind of work you were going to get in the Army. Now I'm not bragging, and I didn't make an outstanding score, but they said I was the kind that they needed. They didn't take anybody with an AGCT of less than I don't know what.

So, I was in the Constabulary Control Section Headquarters Troop, in Bamburg, Germany, which is in Bavaria. It was not bad duty they said, but you've got to do shift work. So we did. We were open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And as Colonel O'Leary put it when he finally got enough people to talk to in there, he said, "When World War III starts in Germany, guess who's going to be the first ones to know about it. You people on the telephones out there, because we are here to keep a 24 hour watch on incidents happening in Germany."

Our job was to take care of what we called "serious incidents." It was called a "serious incident report," and it was an Army form. And a serious incident in that day and time could be anything from to GI's fighting, a GI wrecking a vehicle, a GI assaulting a German, a German stealing rations from an American Army Post, to the Russians getting drunk and crossing the border from their zone to our zone. And the border was only about two miles away then, and shooting up the town which they loved to do, or to the Russians sending three divisions across the line, which they could have done. I would hope our intelligence would have found about it. Incidentally, none of that ever happened, thank goodness.

Most of my time was spent typing it up, talking by telephone the chain of command which started with the platoon, then to the troop, then up to brigade, then in to us. The telephone report of a serious incidence, the first thing, as best I remember, was vehicle accident - when and where it happened, personnel involved - Peter Heinrich, German civilian, age and address, PFC Joe Blow, Company A, First Division US Army, blah, blah, blah, serial number. And we just typed up what these people told us, what their investigation had shown.

Private Joe Blow was driving a 2 1/2 ton truck when he ran off the road and struck this civilian who was riding a bicycle, on the edge or near the edge of the paved road. Results investigated by Corporal So-and-so, such and such an MP Company, US Constabulary; victim taken to Army hospital, and whatever. Four or five copies of it with carbon paper. There were no computers. There was no copying machines. It was very meticulous, that part of the job was not very enjoyable for someone like me who was never a neat typist. But now with word processors and computers, it's so easy to correct your mistakes you don't worry about making them. Back then, it was either throw it away, and I guess we threw away a few bushels of their Army forms because of typing errors, or go through and erase it five times, and start over again, which we tried to do. What happened to these reports, we have no way of knowing. It was interesting duty in that you got to hear about a lot of things that were happening, most of which weren't of earth-shaking importance. So-and so, after leaving the enlisted men's club became embroiled in an argument with three German civilians, or three other soldiers and a fight resulted. MP's arrested So-and so, and that was about it.

One of the most harrowing I got, that I remember, an incident - we worked 24 hours a day and at 5:00 o'clock or 6:00 in the afternoon until about 7:00 in the morning, some officer on the staff at headquarters had to come in. It had to be an officer in that office 24 hours a day. We had our own officers during the daylight hours. We had to fix him a cot every night to go to sleep in and we usually never saw him. He'd bring a book and read and go to sleep and that would be the end of it.

But if something important happened, and we were drilled continually on what was important - the Russians crossing the border, an ammunition dump exploding, an obvious act of sabotage, fires in Army vehicles in the motor pool, which should never happen, we would wake him up just in case it grew into something bigger.

And, one morning, about 2:00 o'clock, I got a call from squadron and it said, "Body found." Well, that's not unusual. "Body parts found." That was unusual. And I said, "Well, go ahead." He said, "This farmer was out walking his dog, and his dog came up bringing a shoe in his mouth." The farmer looked at the shoe and inside of the shoe was a foot. Now that was serious. It showed signs of having been buried. So I called, I told this fellow, "I've gotta have more information before I wake this officer up." I knew where it was and when it happened. I said, "Was it, did the dog find it in a bombed-out building?" This would not have been so unusual or anything to worry about. And he said, "I'll go check back."

So he had to go down through channels and called me back about an hour later and said it was a grave and that it looked like there were several bodies in the grave. I said, "Well, I'd better wake up this officer." And I woke him up, and I said, "Sir, I don't think there's anything to it, but I'd rather be safe than sorry." And he said, "Well, let's wait until daylight."

The reason I got so excited about it, not excited, but the reason I decided to wake him up, is that Germany at that time was covered with what we called DP Camps - Displaced Person Camps. These were these slave-laborers with a few prisoners-of-war, from Poland, Hungary, all over Europe. And the Germans had put them into camps where they could watch them and keep them from escaping and they'd take them to a factory to work or they'd have a little factory in the camp. The Americans just left them in the camp, but we moved in food and medical attention which these people badly needed. They had a strong dislike for anything German, and you can see why. They'd been prisoners and slave-laborers for four years and wanted to go home. We didn't know if they had a home to go to and transportation in their countries, Poland or Russia or Czechoslovakia, any of these other countries, was practically non-existent.

So until arrangements could be made to take care of this people - if we send you 40 people who say they came from your village and were captured by the Germans and made slave-laborers, can you take care of them? Until then, they gradually kept thinning them out. Well these people were strongly antagonistic toward Germans and we had several instances where they would pick fights with them. They wanted to kill them, is the reason. And, I thought this man, if there was a DP Camp nearby, where they said, "Let's get even, and go catch a bunch of Germans working in the fields and take them to the woods and cut their throats and bury them," just to say they did.

Incidentally, backing up to Ziegenheim days, one time in my 18 months overseas, I stood on guard at a food warehouse surrounded by about a 10-foot high fence with barbed wire around the top, and a locked gate. We were using a German warehouse to store our food in. The Germans were hungry.

When I went on guard the Lieutenant told me, he said, "You've got to be aware this is not basic training guard." He said, " These people will break in and steal, and they will try you. They will try any trick they can to get in. If one of them calls you to the fence, "Nein, no!" That's the German word for "no." He said, "Nein! Because, chances are that he's going to grab you by the throat and put a piano wire around your neck through the fence, or, some of his buddies are over on the back side cutting the wire." They wanted to get in, so he said, "You stay in here and you walk where you can see all of our fences up to the warehouse." And it was the most miserable night I've ever spent. I had on every stitch of clothes I could get on and I was still freezing to death. I had a carbine, but I had so many clothes on, it's very doubtful I could have gotten that carbine to my shoulder if I had needed to. But, I didn't need to. The reason I bring this up is to show the relationship between the German civilians and the displaced persons.

Outside of Ziegenheim, we had a Polish displaced persons camp. The Polish probably hated the Germans more than anyone else, any other nationality, because they felt they had been treated the worst. And, as I say, the Army said, "We're feeding these people. We need to give them some work, and relieve the expense of keeping troops over here." So they took some GI uniforms, dyed them navy blue, put them on Polish ex-army men, gave them about two hours training on a carbine, and said, "Now you are to guard."

They are guards around this installation. When we were there, you see, a lot of Germans walking the road would walk up to the fence and look, probably hoping that you would feel sorry and give them something, but again, we didn't do it. They said that when the Polish guards went on and you ever saw a German, they would cross the road to keep from walking next to the fence because they knew that Pole would love nothing better than to shoot them, saying, "They were trying to break in, so I shot them." But, that was my job as a Control Section clerk, and later on Administrative NCO.

After about six months in Bamburg, which was in southern Germany, in Bavaria, and beautiful country, I was transferred. But I enjoyed Bamburg very much because of its proximity to the Alps. I took one trip, or several trips down (?) which was only about 50 or 60 miles away.

And one weekend another man and I managed to get Berchtsgaden, which was Hitler's hideout right on the edge of the border of Austria. I remember very distinctly going in there. It was open only to American soldiers at that time, and it was on the very top of a mountain. I remember we rode in a 2 1/2 ton truck to a sort of a staging area. Then we got into a three-quarter ton weapons carrier and went up a little more, and we were very, very high in the mountains.

It was pure rock, no vegetation at all. Then we went into a cave in the mountains. Inside that cave was a big elevator, much bigger than the standard passenger elevator we see now. I remember it was made of solid brass. The walls were brass. You ride the elevator up, I would say the equivalent of four or five floors, and then you were in the Eagle's Nest, Hitler's little stone house built on the very top of the mountain. It was a spectacular view.

What I remembered about that was that all the windows, all the glass was gone and it had never been damaged by war. It was damaged by the Jews from the Jewish displaced persons camp down at the base of the mountain. And some walls were solid marble, with a fireplace in the middle. I mean the wall would have been, say 10 feet high and 20 feet long, beautiful marble. But every piece of marble that you saw, or at least one piece of marble in every room, there was a Star of David scratched in it. This was the Jews way of saying, "We will show you who's on top now. We'll put our symbol, the Star of David." And, of course, all the swastikas were gone.

I remember coming down that night and there were several Germans walking up. It was in the spring, I remember, and they had on their little short leather pants, and lederhosen. I knew the Germans loved to walk. Their choices of entertainment and recreation were very limited, but some said they were walking up as close to the Eagle's Nest, to Adlerhof, as close as the Americans would let them get, to pay homage to Hitler. They were going to make it a shrine, and I think it was in the early '50's that the Americans took care of that by blowing the whole top of the mountain off, house and all. They said, "Too many Germans are making this a site of a pilgrimage, in honor of Hitler. We don't want that."

Incidentally, those show of forces that we had in Constabulary raids, they had the right to go into any building, public or private. They would go into a private home and look at everything they could find. They were looking for two things - weapons, the Germans were not allowed to possess any kind of a weapon other than a butcher knife with a six-inch blade or something, and Nazi memorabilia, a picture of a fellow in Nazi uniform, and most of them were, was all right. But I remember that we had one report of, I forget exactly what they called it, some kind of raid that had gone into a church in a village and had found a Nazi flag, and they arrested the rector or the priest of the church. What it was, it was a flag left over from a military burial, probably.

I know the church that we used in Ziegenheim was a Lutheran church, being in northern Germany rather than the Catholic southern Germany, and it was a beautiful little church. We used it, I think, at 9:00 in the morning and gave it back to the Germans at 10:00. It had a rounded balcony, it had a balcony on three sides, there were little plaques with dates and a name on them. Obviously these were for the men of that village who had been killed in the war. I was surprised at the numbers for Ziegenheim, no larger a village than it was. Somebody said, "Remember these people have been killing since 1939, all over the world, and the last two years, they got the killing themselves. They weren't killing other people; they were being killed." So that's why the unusual number.

Another incident that happened in Bamburg, its in a way, humorous. Since we were off a lot of times in the daytime, which made a good duty, you could go downtown and wouldn't be bothered with GI's, the Red Cross club was there. You didn't wait for a haircut. It was just fine. Some of us said, "Let's go down to Nuremberg," which was only 50 miles away, or 55, "and watch the war crime trials." So, "Oh, boy, that's great."

We had Class A passes, which meant you were allowed within 50 miles of your base if you weren't on duty, without prior permission. So we went down to Nuremberg and got into the courthouse. You rode the train on your uniform; there were no tickets. If you had on an American uniform, you could go on any public transportation conveyance. Nobody said, "Where's your money, where's your ticket."

And we walked up to the courthouse and there was an MP there and I told him we'd like to go in and sit in on the trials for awhile. He said, "Okay, let me see your pass." And so we pulled out what we called a Class A pass that allowed us to be away from our station within 50 miles. We figured this was good enough. He said, "You can't get in on this." And I said, "Well, why? It's a Class A pass and we're not on duty." And he said, "Bamburg is more than 50 miles from Nuremberg, it's 55 miles."

And I thought, "Lord, he must have had this problem before." We knew that, but we figured he wasn't going to say anything about five miles, or he doesn't know. But he knew, and he would not let us in. But I could say I got to the door of the courthouse while the trials were going on, and there were many, many guards there. I think the Army was displaying every weapon they had - carbines, Tommy guns, shotguns, everybody had a "45" strapped on. So I missed that.

For some reason, and this had been planned in the middle of the war, I understand, they said, "We're moving the headquarters to Heidelberg," which is a little bit to the west, near the Rhine River on the Neckar River. And the most beautiful town in Germany, and one of the larger cities in Germany that never got the least bit of war damage, except - There were three bridges across the Neckar which the Germans blew to try to slow the Americans down.

Some said the Americans strategists in England during the bombing campaign from '42 through '45, said, "Don't touch Heidelberg. That's where we want to make our headquarters." It's an old university town, a beautiful town. There's a tremendous Army base right in the edge of town that we could take over for our troops. This is where I stayed and worked for six months. But, it was far different from some of those other ones where you couldn't walk a block in the middle of town and say this was a city block. You'd say, "This is a pile of rubble."

Here was one wall of a four-story building, and maybe there would be a bathtub sticking out of the wall, hanging at an angle held on only by the plumbing. They hadn't tried to clean up any of the mess. And people were living in the cellar. They would have a little place cleared out with a door under a tremendous pile of stone and brick. Heidelberg was perfect. It's like they left it in the 1400's, and I thoroughly enjoyed being in Heidelberg, with the old university and the castles, and it was a real good place to be. It was the same kind of work we were doing in Bamburg.

I stayed in Heidelberg until May of 1947, and they came up one day and said, "You're going home unless you want to re-up, and I said, "No, thank you, I'd rather go home." I was called into the major's office, the deputy of command, and he said, "I've been looking over your records, here and before you got here. You're the kind of soldier this army needs." I said, "Well, thank you," and he said, "I'm ready to give you another stripe." At that time I was a T-4, which was sergeant with a "T" under it for Technician, Fourth Grade.

And he said, "I'm looking for a Staff Sergeant," and he said, "you're going to be my man." But he said, "You've got to stay with us for another two years." So I told him I was sorry but I didn't think I could do that. So I came home, and that was it. My military service, as one man told me, I wouldn't take a million dollars for it and I wouldn't give you ten cents to do it again, even though I was in no danger, compared to what the people a year or two ahead of me were.

So, I came home, still with a dull pain in my right side, and got out of the Army. Again they went up and stamped, in big letters on my discharge, "THIS MAN RECOMMENDED FOR MORE MILITARY TRAINING," like you were being singled out. And a lot of people didn't stay in, as most of you know. They got in the Army hating every minute of it, and this you decide maybe this isn't a bad a bad life, I'm believe I'll give you 20 years until retirement. So it was a good life for me. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I got, in a sense, an education, and I can't say it helped me good. I picked up a little German, the German language, in Ziegenheim, because I loafed around the motor pool, and we employed German mechanics, a lot. And they wanted to learn English. Most of them were pretty bright young men. All of them were ex-German Army, Wehrmacht, and I wanted to learn German. So we talked back and forth until we picked up a little bit. I never messed with it any more after that except a little self-study. But there were some incidents that sort of opened my eyes a little bit, that there has been a big war here, other than seeing cities leveled. One, I was talking, we had one of our mechanics, a German mechanic. He was about the most jolly fellow you've ever seen, the friendliest, joking fellow. Just a good man to be around.

And one day I was sloughing around the motor pool, and in came some strange officers. They talked to the motor sergeant and he pointed this man out to them. They called him over there, and I thought, "Well, as nice a guy as he is, what has he done that these strange American Army officers want to talk to him?" And they made him take his shirt off, and evidently they told him in German. I was not within earshot. I was watching; I was curious.

They grabbed his left arm and raised it straight up and looked in his left armpit. They looked real close and then they slammed his arm back behind his back and put the handcuffs on him and took him out very roughly. I said, "What is going on?" They said, "He's an ex-SS man." The "SS" was tattooed or burned or something under there - either their double lightening sign or a number.

We'd had a lot of cases where Germans had tried to cut that out, because "SS" men went to jail until they could be checked out thoroughly. They were the most die-hard Nazis, probably guilty of a lot of atrocities. But they took one of our more pleasant mechanics out of the motor pool. And somebody said they found that "V" that what we thought was a "V" was a long upright which was a double "SS," for suche-stoppen I think is the German word which is the name for a special kind of guard, and it was a give-away that you were in trouble. As I say, some of them would take razor blades and try to obliterate that tattoo mark.

So there were a lot of interesting things I learned, and I think I learned a little responsibility because I got to sitting up there at 2:00 o'clock in the morning doing my best to stay awake - the only man in the building awake. I would be thinking, "What am I, a 19-year-old country boy, doing here, with four telephones around me? I ought to be sleeping in a barracks and getting up and standing at attention in the morning with a rifle on my shoulder, with somebody telling me every move to make."

But our commander Lt. Colonel O'Leary was very good. He said, "You have been selected, because somebody thinks you can do this job. And I think it too or I wouldn't have had you." He said, "I could have turned you down." But, he said, "You are going to have some responsibility, and you'd better do it right, or there's plenty of those rifle companies for you." And none of us wanted to go back to that after basic training. So I would say it was a good experience for me. It was a growing-up experience to someone who had never had to take on much responsibility, and got in the Army and said, "Well I don't have to think about anything. They're gonna do my thinking for me now. Just gotta follow orders." But it wasn't like that.

Again, I wouldn't do it again for a million dollars, but, I mean I wouldn't take a million dollars for the experience, but I wouldn't give you ten cents to do it over. Incidentally, I went back to Heidelberg in 1997, to the old Army base that I was in. I walked up to the gate, and of course, there was an MP. I recognized the place even though they've sort of modernized the barracks. And I said, "I was here in May of 1947, exactly 50 years ago, and I wondered if I could walk in here and go up to my old office in my old room," and I knew exactly where they were. And he said, "No! This is headquarters for American Forces Europe and they are very strict." I told him that I wanted to go and he said he would go and ask his company commander. So he ran into the guard house, and his commander said, "Take him inside the gate, but tell him not to take any pictures of this place." That's as far as it got. I said, "All right."

It didn't really matter, but coming out I showed him something. I had a picture taken of me inside the same gate, exactly where we were standing. I had a little camera with me in '97, and he said I could come in but I couldn't take any pictures and I told him I already had a picture taken right where I was standing and didn't need another one. He looked at that, "Where did you get that?" I said I told you I got it in 1947. He looked at me and asked what rank that was. And I said, "Technician 4th Grade. You never saw it did you?" "No, I don't know what it is."

So it was interesting to go back. I would have loved to go up to my old office where I used to watch, it was facing the east, and I have seen the sun rise on many a day. One week 11:00 to 7:00 in the morning, one week 7:00 until 4:30 or 5:00 or whatever and went 'til midnight. And that graveyard shift, that early morning one, you didn't have a whole lot to do, and it was a struggle to stay awake. But as I say, I spent some time thinking, "What am I doing here?" and I could make out a report and upset the whole world. (Laughter.)

But I didn't. We weren't quite that high up. We were trench fighters. We trenched out the voice messages by telephone, and put it on paper and handed it to someone else. What happened to it, I really don't know, and don't care. But we didn't have World War III.

INTERVIEWER: I have one question. You were there at the end of a vicious, terrible, bloody, ghastly war, in a country that was defined as "enemy territory." How would you characterize the Germans with whom you came in contact? Had the just collapsed emotionally? Were they bitter?

WYCHE: They were lethargic, I guess, is the word. It was very obvious they had seen enough war. And those people were hungry. They were just bewildered, and you could see why. They didn't know where their families were, their sons if they were of that age, husbands and brothers they had not heard from in years. Were they dead? - particularly on the eastern front with the Russians. The Russians didn't bother to say, "We got you."

An interesting thing - when I went back to Heidelberg in 1997, I remember going to an old church that we used, right on the main street, right across from the Red Cross Club. I said, "Well, I want to go to that church." The reason, my first cousin I knew here in Wilmington was a chaplain's assistant. He was a great organist. I used to hear him playing in that church, rehearsing in the daytime when I was off duty. I'd be going down to the Red Cross Club just to have something to do and I'd walk over and talk to him. I wanted to see that church and show it to my wife. And I asked two or three Germans, "Is there an old church here? The organ console was out over the sidewalk in a little alcove, strange. And they said they didn't know, they weren't old enough.

I decided to find somebody as old as I was, so I was walking around the university and saw a man who was at least as old as I was and I thought, "Ah, now if he's a native of Heidelberg, he'll know what it looked like " because I thought that church had been torn down or re-done. I could not find it. I went up to him and asked him if he spoke English, "A leetle," he said. I speak German, a very little, but I managed to get across to him what I wanted. And he started laughing. I said, "Are you a native of Heidelberg?" and he said, "No." He said, "I came to Heidelberg in 1950, to the university, and I stayed." I told him what I wanted, that I was here in '47 and there used to be a church, blah, blah, blah. He laughed and said, "From '45 to '49, I was in Siberia." If he hadn't been half-drunk he'd probably have told a real good story, but it was obvious he'd had a lot of beer that day.

But most of the Germans were fed up with war. They were fed up. They were really surprised, in a way, that we were as good to them as we were, because, as I said, we would make work for them. There was no need to hire a woman to clean up our house. Ten American soldiers with nothing to do. Let them clean it up. Go over and inspect it and say, "Get down and scrub the floor." But no, they put this old German woman to work. There was no need, and this took place at Bamberg, I think, not Heidelberg, but for awhile our mess hall had two-man tables with white table cloths and white napkins.

A German string quartet played for every meal. German waiters with stiff-bosom shirts, black bow ties, and a towel across their arms, bringing you a tray of GI chow and putting it in front of you. Now that's a far cry from "C" rations and "K" rations. And when you got through you didn't take your tray and beat it out and put it in the hot water, you walked away just like you'd do in a restaurant today. If you ran out of coffee or water or iced tea, he was there like in a good restaurant. And I thought, "This is the life for me."

And a little German string quartet playing classical music for every meal. That wasn't the army, but that's what I enjoyed. It wasn't that way all the time, but I had found in my very limited contact with the Germans, one on one - I had bought a camera at the PX with no case, and I wanted a case. When you bought things like cameras and watches in the PX then, you went by lottery. If your name came up, you got the opportunity to buy one of these rare things. This was another move done by the Americans. The camera I bought was a Kodak Retina I, one of the first cameras made in Stuttgart, Germany, in the Kodak factory.

After World War II the Americans told this Kodak factory, "Hey, look, get into production. We'll help you and we'll buy everything you make. We want to sell to our GI's, but we want you to put people back to work." And you bought anything your lottery came up for, because you put your name in and it went to everything. I bought a woman's pocketbook from Spain. Why did I need a woman's pocketbook? I didn't, but I had plenty of money so I bought it and sent it home. I bought a beautiful crystal vase from Czechoslovakia. What does a GI need with a crystal vase? And things like that.

The Germans finally came around to appreciate that. We had no problem hiring mechanics, housekeepers, janitors in our company. Why, you paid them in money, but the money couldn't buy anything - there was nothing to buy, but we gave them a GI meal in the middle of the day and they ate right after we did. Never did I see one of them leave the mess hall without a little American mess kit. They had taken half that food and they were going to carry it home to their family, you know, because they didn't have much to eat.

The currency was cigarettes. We paid 55 cents a carton. I used to give a pack of cigarettes, and everybody said, "You're overpaying her," every week to a woman to do my laundry. A German woman who would come up into the barracks and would sew, and I've still got some of the shirts with that in it, would sew a certain series of x's to tell her which GI this belonged to. And she would walk into a room with eight bunks in it and put your laundry, starched and ironed, on that bunk. She'd never miss. I was three x's with a line under it. But she would take that pack of cigarettes, and Lord, she was the richest person in town.

I'll never forget, she had a grandson living - I guess he was eight or ten years old, and we bought, everything was rationed to us at the PX, including five candy bars a week, five packs of Life Savers. Nobody ate Life Savers, but we'd buy them because they were there. I'd always give that little kid a box of Life Savers. I'd say, "Here!" and offer them to him. He would step out and snap to attention, and stick his hand out, and I'd give him a tube, a roll of Life Savers. He'd step back, snap to attention again, "Dankê," thank you. And I thought that was funny. We used to give them to him just to see him go through that routine. (Laughter.) He was very military. But, I learned a lot of little things like that, and I really enjoyed it. They were not important, not money-making necessarily, but I learned how to live. The Germans had had enough war.

INTERVIEWER: All right.